Pottstown School Board weighs $225K expenditure for football lights

POTTSTOWN — No matter what the school board ultimately decides, roughly $80,000 will be spent shortly to take down the poles on which the lights that make Friday night football at Grigg Memorial Field possible.

What remains unknown, is whether or not they will be replaced.

The cost, as laboriously revealed at the Nov. 15 school board meeting, is as much as $225,000.

That price seemed a little high for some school board members and they put off voting on the matter until they can get more information about how much money comes into the district through admission at Friday night football games.

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The chief advocate for replacing the light poles and lights is School Board Vice President Robert Hartman Jr., who also heads up the school board’s facilities committee.

Although Pottstown has had a lighted football field since the 1950s, the current wooden poles and lights were put in their current location in 1982 and it was not until 2010 that the board became aware of structural issues with the poles.

The board held off on fixing the poles, Hartman explained, because it would cost nearly as much as replacing them with more durable aluminum poles.

The money for replacements, a maximum of $225,000, is largely available, Hartman said, as a result the state providing $200,000 more to Pottstown in its 2013 budget than the district had expected to receive.

“It’s better to spend that on a one-time cost, rather than a program that incurs costs year after year,” Hartman said of the state funding.

But others were not so sure, given the tight budget environment, that new lights and poles is the best use of $200,000.

“We’ve asked the teachers and staff to make sacrifices and we are trying to avoid cutting programs and this is not an academic expense,” said board member Ron Williams, who recognized his opposition “won’t make me popular in the athletic community.”

“I just don’t think we can do this at this point in time,” he said.

High school math teacher Robert Decker, who was there representing the Pottstown Federation of Teachers, also questioned whether this was the best use of money given that his union had just agreed to a three-year contract that includes one year of pay freezes and a significant increase in their contribution to health insurance benefits.

“We’ve been sitting at the negotiating table for more than a year listening to talk of cutting programs, furloughing teachers and increases in (retirement) costs, so its very difficult to understand how we now have an additional $200,000, which could possibly off-set some these things for another year,” said Decker.

That money, said Decker, “could represent one more year of keeping the noose away from our neck. I look at this as a windfall that could save us from the dragon’s fire for another year.”

The amount of money in question is just over the 183,958 budget gap the board finally faced in June after the administration had whittled the budget down and which it closed with a 1.2 percent tax hike that was finally adopted.

One way or another, said School Board President Judyth Zahora, “we’re going to have to spend $80,000 to take the poles down. They have to come down.”

“Yes and spending $205,000 to $225,000 to put up new ones is almost three times the cost,” said board member Mary Beth Bacallao, who expressed her reservations about the move several times.

Board member Andrew Kefer noted that when he attended Coatesville High School, there were no lights used and football games were played during the day on Saturday.

The danger to holding off on replacing the lights and poles now, Hartman argued, “is we’re not going to get it back, let’s face it.”

After the meeting, Hartman said “if we don’t do this now, it means the end of Friday night football in Pottstown.”

About the Author

Evan Brandt has worked for The Mercury since November 1997. His beat includes Pottstown, the surrounding townships and the Pottstown and Pottsgrove school districts, as well as other varied general topics like politics, the environment and education. Reach the author at ebrandt@pottsmerc.com
or follow Evan on Twitter: @PottstownNews.